Alborz

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IHF America, the US counterpart of the Iran Heritage Foundation (IHF), is proud to inform the US audience of the launch of the Golha Project Website, a 7-year digitization effort sponsored by the IHF.

The programs known generally as Golha, ‘Flowers [of Persian Poetry and Song],' were a series of weekly radio programs aired on Iranian radio between 1956 and 1979. The musical and literary repertoire of the Golha programs covered the entire history of classical as well as contemporary Persian poetry, giving expression to the whole gamut of traditional Persian music and poetry. The foremost and best musicians, vocalists, literary critics, poets and announcers performed on the programs, thus providing a unique – and still the best and most poetically diverse – recorded collection of the classical corpus of Persian music and poetry made in the 20th century.

The Golha Project Website is a searchable encyclopaedia of Persian poetry and music with audio recordings of all of the Golha radio programs, available for free to the general public. It comprises a database of more than 1000 hours of audio material, searchable by 18 different search criteria such as musical modes, instruments, poetic verse, poetic genre, singer, and songwriter names, etc. The website allows the visitors to go directly to specific sections within the audio programs and start playing a song, a melody or a poem based on their search result.

These programmes covered the entire history of classical as well as contemporary Persian poetry, giving marvellous expression to the whole gamut of traditional Persian music and poetry.

The Golhā Project has been supported by the British Library Endangered Archives Program, the Music Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London (SOAS), The British Institute of Persian Studies (BIPS), the Iran Heritage Foundation (IHF) and the Parsa Foundation.

This site is produced by Jane Lewisohn of the Music Department at SOAS, University of London with the support of the Iran Heritage Foundation, London.